There’s a quaint little coastal village, way up in the North-eastern corner of the country, that you could so easily overlook on a tour of Scottish points-of-interest because it’s just a little too far from the main road, or the train doesn’t go there. But if you ever do get the chance to meander along the coastline in Moray you’d probably be pleasantly surprised to find the little row of restaurants, cafes and bars overlooking a modern foot bridge which takes you directly onto a five-mile expanse of white sand peppered with crumbling concrete world-war-two pillboxes and dunes inhabited by seals and rare ground-nesting birds.
It’s too cold for most people to sit outside for nine months of the year, and most are surprised to see twenty-first century fighter jets from the nearby NATO air defence base practicing low-level manoeuvres above the cliffs or scrambling to intercept Russian fighters that regularly read their maps upside down.
Like most coastal settlements in Britain, it was once a thriving fishing village with a harbour full of industrious little boats, but today the boats are more recreational, and they’ve moved to a marina a little further up the coast, leaving the old harbour to silt up, so that at low tide you can walk your dog right out onto a sandbar that fills the harbour mouth, from where you can see a jagged rock that juts out into the water just like every other rock along that stretch of coastline.
This rock has never been written about in tourist guides or ogled by tourists, and I dare say that it only ever appears in holiday snaps when it’s accidentally in the background, but this rock had great significance to the locals.
In official circles its referred to as Auchenbrae Rock, named after the old manor, that once overlooked it. Children call it “Landlord’s Stone”, and those who remember sometimes call it “That Creepy Bastard’s Ledge”, but however they call it, nobody climbs it at low tide. Not after what happened there. Not after the videos.
The story begins as most distasteful things did in Lossiemouth, with Seamus MacCrimmon. Seamus was the twenty first century Laird in all but title. He didn’t wear tartan waistcoats or carry a shooting stick, but instead he oozed through the town in a tailored suit of this month’s most fashionable grey or blue fabric, smoking cartoon cigars that came in cedar boxes and smelt faintly of caramel.
He was partial to posting weekly humblebrags on Twitter about “honouring tradition and embracing local family-owned business”.
His company ‘MacCrimmon Heritage Investments Ltd.’ Now owned more than half of the cottages on the seafront and many of those rising up the hillside behind them. Where once locals fixed and dried their nets, now yoga instructors from Surrey hung fairy lights. Where children once dug for lugworms, now stag and hen parties in matching onesies sank Jägermeister slammers and puked in front gardens while trying to remember where their Airbnb was. And every year Seamus would raise the rents just a little bit.
“A rising tide lifts all boats,” he’d say in his carefully cultivated, almost English accent.
“Aye,” muttered the old boy on the next barstool “and drowns the rest ay us.”
Seamus worked hard to get his name everywhere. Sponsorship at the local golf club, donations to the harbour festival, always accompanied by huge banners with his smug face smiling out at potential customers. He made loud and blustery appearances at council meetings where he pretended to champion local culture while his development company quietly bulldozed landmarks and ancient woodlands, and he bought Auchenbrae House, the old, ruined manor house on the cliff, the one everyone said was haunted, then spent millions turning it into a luxury spa retreat for the super-rich and called it ‘Moira by the Sea’.
It was named after his late wife, and the opening ceremony was the only time he showed any sign of humanity in public.
Moira MacCrimmon drowned during an unfortunate kayaking accident ten years earlier. Some people said that she had rolled herself over deliberately and calmly sucked the water into her lungs to escape the clutches of her husband, and while no one was brave enough to say it to his face, he had heard the whispered comments and sniggering and chose to ignore it. Moira was the only person he had genuinely loved, and he missed her every day thereafter. He spoke of her publicly only the once, at the opening of ‘Moira by the Sea’, standing before a crowd of influencers and lifestyle journalists.
“The sea” he said, “had taken the most valuable thing from his life, and ‘Moira by the Sea’ would be a place for customers to relax and refresh and maybe, take back something from the sea to balance the debt.” There were obligatory laughs and applause from the crowd, but his joke fell a bit short.
That was the last normal thing that happened for a while.
The following day a storm blew in from the Atlantic. It boiled up over the Cairngorms, gathering speed and ferocity, and then plunged down the Eastern slopes heading for the sea. By the time it reached Lossiemouth it was strong enough to pick up wheelie bins and throw them against cars or roll them down the street until something got in their way.
Seamus had ignored the advice to “sit tight and wait it out” and had climber in his brand-new Tesla to drive up from his new home in Aberdeen. Two of his seafront cottages, which had survived more than two hundred years before he bought them, were starting to take on water as it crashed over the sea wall and passed easily through and around the modern ‘storm-proof’ windows and doors.
At 10:43pm, the CCTV camera on the front of The Steamboat Inn captured him in a Barbour coat and tailored chinos marching toward the shoreline with a hard hat tucked under his arm like a gladiator entering the arena. He was yelling into his phone. The audio was leaked on TikTok the following day:
“ … don’t tell me about weather warnings, I own half this beach and I’ll talk to the tide if I want to … No, you listen, I’m not losing the bloody rent during half-term … “.
At 10:47pm, according to a search of the local mast records, his phone went offline.
At 6:12am, a dogwalker found his Tesla parked at a jaunty angle, across three spaces, with its headlights flashing and doors unlocked. No sign of Seamus.
At 6:20am, a wild swimmer found his hard hat floating upside-down near Auchenbrae Rock like a cereal bowl.
At 6:23am, someone posted a picture of it on Facebook with the caption: “Laird’s away tae the deeps , #WateryWanker”. It got 312 likes before the police asked for it to be taken down.
His body never did turn up.
Locals mourned with enthusiasm that some might feel a little inappropriate. The corner shop was selling T-shirts reading “MacCrimmon Went Swimmin” and the next night someone spray-painted “Sea’s Rent Due” in three-foot high, luminous green letters on the harbour wall.
And yet.
Nobody felt like walking into the water barefoot for at least a week after.
Small things started happening, so small that no one even mentioned them at first: Auchenbrae road inexplicably stank of rotting seaweed; Residents were startled to find seagulls quietly perched on window sills in threes and fours, staring in at their windows; smartphones pinged blank notifications at 3am, even in silent mode, and always three times.
Two weeks later Alec Beattie, a twenty-three year old part-time drone hobbyist and full-time conspiracy content creator who called himself @MorayMysteries, was filming dolphins just outside the harbour. He flew his drone toward a jagged rock, hoping to snap something interesting. The footage was livestreaming straight to his fans on YouTube.
At first he caught dolphins circling the rock in a slow procession but then the camera seemed to refocus, and all of a sudden, there he was, standing on the rock, barefoot and dripping wet.
“Holy crap,” Alec screamed on-stream. “it’s MacCremmon!”
The feed pixelated, then, as it cleared again the figure turned toward the drone, bottomless wells for eyes, and raised one arm as if to point, not at the drone or at Alec, but at the town. Alec captured about three seconds of this before the feed cut and the drone automatically returned to its LZ.
Reddit lost its collective mind. TikTok influencers stopped hand-jiving and, as one, they mimicked the frosty pointing pose to advertise everything from slimming pills to the latest Chinese electric car, and Alec was interviewed on ITV’s Lorraine show by the following Wednesday.
Coincidentally, on the night of the filming, the security alarms at Moira by the Sea went off at 3am but no trespassers were found, and it kept happening. After a few nights of this, the manager, assuming that it was caused by some freak electrical surge at night, employed a night watchman to turn the alarm off at 2:58am and back on again at 3:02am, which seemed to solve the problem.
Once the ghost video was online odd things just seemed to keep happening. Drones flown near Auchenbrae would plummet from the sky with dead batteries, Car alarms would go off repeatedly until residents got so wound up that they started leaving their cars unlocked at night. And Alexa devices had to be unplugged entirely because they started whispering “Rent’s due” periodically through the night. Even confirmed sceptics struggled to work out what was happening.
Inside Auchenbrae House (still under renovation) the trouble had only multiplied. Motion sensors were continually being triggered, even when the alarms hadn’t been set. Wet footprints would appear several times a day leading from the main door to the wall where the old fireplace had been before it was replaced by a wall of diagonal cubbyholes filled with rolled-up white towels.
And when a plasterer heard a voice behind him whisper “Fire, Heat, Pay up.” All the workers walked off site.
Isla MacRae hadn’t been back to Lossiemouth for over a decade. After graduation she had been catapulted into a busy career researching the validity of disputer hereditary estates and had quickly formed her own busy and successful historical consultancy. Her father had been a life-long fisherman until his health failed. He had never settled into a life on land and had quickly passed away. She herself had written two books on Maritime Folklore, both of which had been very well received, and made it onto the lower slopes of the Sunday Times Top 100 Bestsellers in their year.
This visit was a long overdue rest and regroup that she had justified to herself by collecting and cataloguing local legends for a new podcast series called ‘North Sea Nightmares.’ She fully expected to debunk all of them, but fate had other plans.
Isla rented a draughty cottage near the dunes from an online agency, so the first contact she had with the owners was when she received an automated email entitled ‘LOVE FROM MACCRIMMON 😊 DON’T FORGET YOUR RENT!’
The irony wasn’t lost on her.
Drone footage could easily be faked she thought. Alarms, Alexa units and automatic email systems could all be hacked, and now more oddballs appeared with stories: surfers who claims that dolphins were pushing them to the rock; fishermen inexplicably finding beautifully boned and dressed fish on the quay in front of their boats; and a council official saying that his office had been overrun with complaints about a ghostly stalker who whispered in people’s ears as they walked by the harbour. She recorded it all dryly for her podcast, signing off each episode with “Probably bullshit.”
Then the dreams began. Always the same. She stood barefoot on the rock at low tide. Around her dolphins circled in complete silence, like bathwater when the plug has been pulled out and a vortex forms only to collapse into a gurgling splosh at the end. Only it didn’t gurgle. Above the sky was battleship grey, and as she looked around, there was no land, no harbour, just sea and sky everywhere. Then, without a sound, without the suggestion of the movement of air, he was standing beside her, his elbow almost touching hers. Or what was left of his elbow.
His face was pale and bloated, like a half-eaten and overripe mushroom. Barnacles crusted his jaw, and seaweed clung to him like Sellotape to an inquisitive kitten. His mouth hung open, and Isla couldn’t help the feeling that he was pleading, begging for her help.
“Cold,” he rasped “Fire. Moira.”
That’s when she always woke with a start, sweating, with damp hair across her face.
She tried to rationalise it. That was her job after all. Maybe it was some kind of mass trauma she considered, or a viral psychosis, some terrifying new disease from the deep ocean that was infecting the people who lived near the coast. But then she saw him. Not in a dream, but for real, in daylight.
Isla was walking near the shore with a take-away coffee from Harbour Lights, muttering into her recorded. “There’s a running theme here, spectral landlords, a symbolic representation of economic anxiety, a commodification of …”
She stopped. The air went deathly still, the wind, the gulls, the dog barking away along the beach, all gone.
A pod of dolphins appeared offshore, breaching once, twice, three times.
A thick fog, that didn’t roll in but in an instant enveloped her and blotted out everything so that she had to stop walking for fear of injuring herself. She shivered and steadied herself.
Where she had been walking on paving slabs, her feet were now in water. She looked down. The water wasn’t cold but it seemed to curl around her calves with the unmistakable feeling of being held in place.
She knew she should leave. Every sensible part of her mind screamed it. But something fundamental to her being, something deep inside held her in place.
The dolphins breached and floated in a semi-circle, watching her, observing, like panel-show judges. Then the water beside her swelled and rose. Not like a man getting up laboriously out of the shallow water, but as if he was being conjured from the water itself, rising like a 3D-printed model, Seamus MacCrimmon emerged at her side.
He wasn’t grotesque. He just seemed ‘unfinished’. His skin was pale blue and swollen, glistening with scales that seemed to be pushing their way out through his flesh. Barnacles now crowned his temple like a looped laurel branch and his navy-blue jacket had melted into the flesh of his chest like sea glass into sand. His mouth opened, not to speak, but to drain.
After a minute the corpse spoke.
“You live in my house.”
For a moment Isla almost laughed. Some deeply Scottish part of her almost replied, “Aye, and you can stop charging me £950 a month for a damp one bedroom you haunting bastard.” But the joke died in her throat, and she took pity on him.
She swallowed. “Technically, I rent it from the estate …”
“Help me.” His voice sounded wrong, Layered, as if a multitude of voices spoke through him. Barnacles clicked against each other every time he moved his jaw.
“Why me?”
“You’re not afraid of me, of ghosts,” he said, “you heard me without screaming.”
She hesitated. “You tormented people. You profited from their fear of you when you were alive. Why should I help you?”
There was a long pause before he spoke. He seemed to be staring straight out in front, looking for something beyond the fog. “Debt is debt. Even mine.” A ripple of something passed across him: maybe shame, or maybe just self-pity. “Moira waits. Cold. I wait. Cold. Fire is old law. Fire to break the bargain.”
The dolphins shifted. Watching expectantly.
“Why should I free you?” Isla whispered. “You made life a living hell for half the people in this town.”
His whole body shuffled around to face her, and he looked deep into her eyes, and for a moment she didn’t see Seamus the landlord. She saw a sobbing man who had lost the love of his life and made a bargain with the sea, a man who had offered up his own soul as payment for the release of another.
“I was not kind,” he said simply. “But now I’m done.”
She felt it then. Not pity. Not forgiveness. But a sense of symmetry. A story demanding completion. An ending she could provide.
She exhaled. “If I do this … you don’t come back.”
“Not unless rent’s late.”
Despite herself, she snorted. “Right. Fine. One funeral pyre. But I get my security deposit back.”
Isla came and went from the island for more than an hour. First she brought driftwood and piled it until the stack reached her shoulders, then she ducked under a line of ewe trees at the back of the beach and came back with an armful of dry branches. She nipped back to the cottage to collect the paper from her recycling bin, including the reminder notices from MacCrimmon Investments, and a box of matches.
All the while Seamus watched silently, as did the dolphins. When she struck the match her hand shook so much that she nearly dropped it.
“For the record,” she whispered, “this is the strangest tenancy negotiation I’ve ever been part of.”
Somehow, MacCrimmon managed a smile.
She touched the flame to the paper, and the night flared a blinding white. Steam hissed, barnacles cracked, and Seamus let out a gut-wrenching cry, like a boiler venting pressure.
Then silence.
The dolphins breached once then turned and sped away. The waves sighed against the beach, and all returned to normal.
From that time on, Isla never received another reminder from her rental company. In fact she wasn’t charged any rent at all for the remaining six months of her tenancy.
The MacCrimmon Investments website went offline within a matter of days.
The Moira by the Sea spa development was sold quietly to a local co-op and rebranded ‘The Driftwood Centre.’ A community-led, affordable housing project. The mosaic mural of Moira smiling at the horizon was left intact in the lobby and can still be seen today.
Children dare each other to run out to Auchenbrae rock to touch it at low tide, and there are more tourists than before who brave the narrow, winding roads to visit Lossiemouth in the hope of seeing the ghostly landlord. Thanks in no small part to a podcast series hosted by Alec Beattie in which he replays and analyses that drone footage again and again for his growing audience.
When she left Lossiemouth to return to her own home in Edinburgh, Isla had compiled an enormous folder of research for her podcast. The biggest and most personal was of course about Seamus MacCrimmon, the Ghostly Landlord. But she never did air that show, because none of her fans would believe it anyway.
The local say that each October, a pod of dolphins quietly breaches by the rock and swims silently around it three times before diving and swimming away. But that could just be a myth.
